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EconolineCrush writes "Tired of paying the Windows tax on notebooks? Asus's Eee PC 1201T budget ultraportable comes without a traditional operating system and sells for only $380. The 12-inch system has promising specifications, sporting an Athlon Neo processor, Radeon HD 3200 graphics, Bluetooth, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. It weighs just 3.2lbs with a 6-cell battery and can even handle light gaming duties. However, battery life in Ubuntu is considerably shorter than it is under Windows. Are there any better options for would-be laptop Linux users?"

Well, personall 12.1 is kinda big for a netbook, but then I though the line was closer to 8"... I guess the only thing that makes the difference is the processor now-a-days. However, to narrow it down further, I believe you should run it though the flow chart found here:

I remember when the eeePc's and other netbooks started coming out for sub $300 prices that it wouldnt be long before we would see $150 netbooks... But I guess that isnt what happened because netbooks seemingly get more and more expensive.

Where are the cheap netbooks that I thought were the intent of the product?!

Hm, odd most of the major tech blogs have said something about Cherry Pal's products, but yeah, seems scam-like enough. Plus they have a crap site. If they really did ship those things on time they wouldn't be too bad for small robotic projects.

I believe what we're seeing a coalescing of different pressures keeping prices high, including customer wanting Windows, substantial market requirements for CPU power (higher resolution media playback, etc), some key applications not currently available on ARM, marketing channels not setting appropriate expectations vis-a-vis product capabilities. I also believe existing hardware suppliers are somewhat reluctant to race each other to the bottom in pricing and margin.

Could the lack of $150 netbooks have something to do with the lack of cheap RAM and other parts? I remember getting 4GB of DDR2 RAM for $50. I bought 3 sets in different months. Now that same RAM is $90+. That is just one example. Maybe the cost of the parts went up and that made everything else go up?

Where are the cheap netbooks that I thought were the intent of the product?!

Well, we lost the NET in netbooks. Like others have mentioned, they started pushing them as desktop replacements with faster processors and Windows. Also, somehow netbooks got defined as sub 12" displays with 160+ gigabyte hard drives. Netbooks were supposed to be small, light, and with a long battery life that ran simple applications and connected to the Internet. And wifi is being replaced with 3g for web access so that cell c

It sold for less last year because of Microsoft contractually restricting the CPU power and specs of WinXP netbooks. Cause Microsoft does not like netbooks. Because they are supposed to be cheap. And Microsoft don't do cheap.

Now as for power issues in Linux: please RTFUPMDFAOTWAKSAM ("Read the f-ing Ubuntu power management documentation found all over the web and kindly stop annoying me")

But Microsoft OSes don't need this sort of tweaking, and it's one of the things Ubuntu was supposed to get away from; requiring end users to be more knowledgeable than they have to be. Why isn't there an expert system in the power management options app that will change these settings according to users' wishes?

Just buy the Eee PC 1005PE. I don't regret my purchase for a second and a 10+ hour real-world battery life is absolutely beautiful on a netbook. I wouldn't even consider a laptop or netbook with a pitiful 5 hour or less battery life these days. The whole point of a netbook is portability and that means not being shackled to an AC power outlet to power or recharge your laptop all the time so why wouldn't you pick the netbook with the most battery life?

Portability when it comes to battery life, and in a cheap package, is here already. But I have this dream of being able to play Diablo2 in a cathedral during organ concert, on a cemetery during the night of 1st-2nd November [wikipedia.org], or in a train compartment (especially with some nouns present). Only clit or mouse would be sufficient; and mouse is mostly just luggable, not fully portable...;/

From what I understand a lot of PCs with Windows can sell for cheaper than the base cost of the system. The reason is that they are effectively subsidized by the pre-installed thirdparty spam-ware. The thirdparty software vendors pay to have their applications pre-installed which covers the cost of the windows license plus a little bit extra. So the only way a linux or no-OS computer could be cheaper is if they also had a similar deal.

Debian Eee [debian.org]
Gentoo Eee [eeeuser.com]
EasyPeasy [geteasypeasy.com]
Ubuntu
Of course Ubuntu has a Eee flavor of the kernel, I chose to go a full blown Hardy Heron install on my netbook. I was given mine by a friend who was gonna throw it away. I removed the Xandros that was on it and installed Ubuntu and other than a bit of fun hacking around with it, it's quite useless other than using the terminal. Firefox on the web with it is crap, no memory whatsoever so if you have more than 1 tab open it takes forever to do anything. Forget about compiling something while websurfing cause that won't happen. My advice to people thinking about getting these, for the price if you double it, you get a pretty kick ass laptop these days. Go for the laptop, more power, more space, more ram, more CPU, more functional!

> My advice to people thinking about getting these, for the price if you double it, you get a pretty kick ass laptop these days. Go for the laptop, more power, more space, more ram, more CPU, more functional!

If lack of RAM is the problem, then install more RAM. I upgraded my Eee 901 to 2GB of RAM and that brought total cost up to $300. It allows me to use RAM for/tmp which makes it not nearly so sluggish. Firefox is still problematic. I think it does a lot of disk writes and that causes unacceptably long freezes on the Eee so I use Chromium (on Ubuntu.)

I don't do compiles and I certainly would not recommend it for a desktop or laptop replacement, but when I travel it meets my needs for browsing, email, loading podasts on my Sansa and occasional word processing and presentations.

I may have something similar, an eee 900a with 1Mb RAM and 4Gb ssd. The problem is that not only is 4Gb too small, but it's a very slow ssd, worse than any hard drive. I spend about $50 to replace it with a much faster 16Gb, and installed Ubuntu NBR. It's now quite reasonable for web surfing. Flash movies are slow, but watching video with mplayer or vlc, even full-screen, is fine. It's great for traveling, as it fits in a small shoe bag and gets 3-4 hours battery life.

Actually you can get a used ultraportable from the CoreDuo generation for same price.A bit bigger, a lot more powerful and a real keyboard to boot.

IBM X60 series used or Dell D4XX series = same price as cheap netbook
upgrade to 2Gb + 320Gb HDD = same as expensive netbook but full size kb, screen can go higher than 1024x600 (even 1024x768 is a vast improvement considering how most websites are formatted), decent processor in return for less portability.

I don't understand why there are no laptops with a small power supply and (barely..) no battery.95% of my laptop work is close to a socket and to a wifi internet connection. The trouble is that most laptops i used until now do not have a small power adapter. You still have to lug a considerabele power supply.

Battery is useful, but i could live without, and it would shave a small amount of the price and weight. And with a modularised design it could just be an other option.

95% of my laptop work is close to a socket and to a wifi internet connection.

A lot of restaurants provide free Wi-Fi but don't have any customer-accessible power outlets. And not everybody requires the Internet all the time; some laptop users (such as myself) can get work done while commuting on a bus, train, or carpool.

I happen not to live in such a country. Instead, I live in the United States, where "3G" is how much one would have to spend over the course of four years for mobile broadband service at $60 per month, capped at 5 GB per month. (Right now, my Virgin Mobile phone bill is $80 per year.) Business managers can justify the expense, but I can't, especially when I have to pay another $60 per month for cable Internet at home.

My Eee PC 1005HA has a very small brick. It's a little wider and taller bigger than a Zone candy bar and about as long. It also has very long battery life. The only problem (as mentioned below) is that it gets really hot (~7 Amps), probably because of the small surface area.

Converting a certain number of watts from AC to DC generates a certain amount of heat, and you can only improve the thermal efficiency of the inverter to a certain degree, then it starts getting more expensive very fast.

The smaller they make the power supply that provides a given wattage, the more problems you're going to have cooling it due to a smaller surface from which to radiate the heat.

Making it internal would be a nightmare, because then all that heat would be contained inside the case when

Seriously. Why didn't they just dump something like vanilla ubuntu on the laptop? At least it would have something on it. If it's being sold without an OS, presumably it's being sold to someone who knows how to install. Even Asus' Splashtop would have been good.

Here in Thailand, or at least in Chiang Mai, most of the computers and laptops I've seen come with FreeDOS preinstalled. If you don't want to install an OS yourself (and don''t prefer Freedos;) you can just leave the new computer to the shop and pick it up with a OS of your choice a few hours later for a dollar or two extra install fee + price of the OS.

Here in Thailand, or at least in Chiang Mai, most of the computers and laptops I've seen come with FreeDOS preinstalled. If you don't want to install an OS yourself (and don''t prefer Freedos;) you can just leave the new computer to the shop and pick it up with a OS of your choice a few hours later for a dollar or two extra install fee + price of the OS.

This happens a lot in SE Asia. I've found DOS and NO OS PC's in Pantip Plaza Bangkok (Spelling? then again there is no direct letter translation between

That's true, especially in this economy. Find the company that gets all the now-useless hardware from companies that have outsourced their IT. Hardware up to three years old, but still good by today's standards.

But the fact that this is rarely the case for any Linux-based desktop system tells me why power-saving and other (usually audio) features don't work well.

Its interesting that most of the (few) brands that work well with a distro like Ubuntu off the shelf also tend to be companies that offer certain models with Linux pre-installed. They're not like Dell, who will design a prototype from available components, then go to the component OEMs and say "We're making 2 million of this new system, but some of your chips come with standard features we'd rather leave out or fudge in software... chop that stuff off your chips and drop your price if you want our business".

Of course, the Linux drivers tend to be written for the OEM originals with their standard features intact, not the funky special-request variations made by Dell, Acer, etc. for their budget models.

What this translates into is that Johnny is perplexed as to why Linux has poor "PC compatibility".

Someone (that means us) needs to start insisting on systems that were designed with Linux or preferably a popular landmark distro like Ubuntu in mind. And we need to stop setting our friends and colleagues up for failed experiments when handing them discs expecting they can just run it on their PCs; It reflects badly on our judgment as individuals and on free open source software in general.

The article says they used Ubuntu, but doesn't say whether they're using regular desktop Ubuntu or the Netbook remix [ubuntu.com]. They admit that they haven't optimized the kernel: it's entirely possible that battery life could be improved by recompiling the kernel with different flags or some equally esoteric maneuver. Of course normal users shouldn't have to optimize their kernels, but installing the netbook edition shouldn't be that esoteric. The article doesn't say if they did that or not, but if they had, I su

It unfortunately tries (unsuccessfully) to perform throttling based upon load rather than having discrete under/overclocking modes as the proprietary Catalyst driver does. The result of which is that the GPU always draws excessive amounts of power even when running off the battery. The only real solution at this point is to swap out the open source driver for the ATI proprietary one and then use the "aticonfig" utility to set the power state according to your need at the time. Other non-GPU optimizations can be done as well, however, the power wasting the GPU is doing with the xf86 drivers is an order of magnitude greater.

Because it's a pain to haul around. Full-size laptops suck batteries. They're heavy and clumsy. A 15-inch laptop seems like a good idea until you lug it around for three or four hours and then sit down in seat 4B on a CRJ. You can't even get a full-size laptop open on your typical crappy airline seat these days.

Netbooks are great for portability, but their screen size is too small and the squished keyboards suck.

The advantage of the 11.6 form factor is that it gives you near-netbook portability, but it's big enough for serious work and there's enough space for normal-size keys.

I have an Acer 1410 in that size. It's great. It makes my 13-inch Macbook feel like a whale. I much prefer it for traveling. In fact, I prefer it, period.

The article linked showed battery life using different models of the Eee. Maybe I'm blind, but I did not see ANY listings of battery life under different OS. I know that UNR 9.10 does not get the battery life of ASUS' remix of Gentoo that came with my Eee 901, but the added functionality is more than worth it. I would assume the bloat of Windows 7 would also eat more juice -- or be handicapped, the way the version of XP that came with some 701 and 901s was. I will be upgrading my Eee soon to UNE 10.04 (

Hi, you must be new. Welcome to the interweb! When you see underlined text on a "web site" you can "click" on the words to get more information. In this case if you clicked on "comes without a traditional operating system [techreport.com]" you would have learned that "Asus ships the Eee PC 1201T with only its ExpressGate instant-on OS". Isn't that neat? Have fun!

Expressgate is to traditional OS as Knara is to traditional human being. Expressgate can do simple things, like browse the web, but is incapable of more advanced tasks, similar to how Knara can (apparently) browse the web, but fails at more complex tasks like thinking.

Not at all. They use "traditional operating system" to mean something (even though they're very obviously trying to avoid saying "without Windows"). I want to know why they used that term instead of the plainly obvious, obfuscated meaning.

I understand that you are being purposefully obtuse to make a point. There is a quality that separates Windows from non-traditional operating systems. Market share. People "traditionally" bought PCs with Windows on them. This doesn't follow that tradition, and thus either has no OS or a non-traditional one.

It looks like you are fishing for some deeper meaning, and it isn't there. The statement is 100% correct, and your feigned confusion could have been mistaken for real the first post, but when you co

I'm curious as to why they even bothered to say anything but "without Windows" when they clearly meant "without Windows".

Because netbooks are also sold with Ubuntu or Xandros installed on them. Netbooks are commonly sold with instant-on environments and a general purpose operating system on the hard disk. But hardly ever are desktop computers and laptops sold with nothing on them at all except for an instant-on operating system environment. Hence the use of the term "traditional".

But you fail to see the point. The phrase "without a traditional operating system" is very different than "without the traditional operating system."

You seem to have a problem with understanding that I can see your point, understand your logic, and yet still disagree. If I'm in a one-car-family and I get ready to go to the store and someone calls after me "are you taking a bus to the store?" I could answer "No, I'm taking a car." This word usage distinguishes one method of transport from another without

It's a limit imposed by Microsoft. Or at least that was the case when netbooks came with Windows XP, now that they use Windows 7 I don't know if it's still the same. Basically there was a list of specifications the netbook should not exceed if the manufacturer wanted to get Windows at a reduced price. The ones I remember are 1 GB of RAM max and no more than a single CPU core. I think the hard disk capacity and the screen size were limited too.

Huh? what? are you kidding? my everyday PC is an ASUS B202 just as it shipped, it's hanging on the back of a Samsung 19" monitor and it does everything admirably, maybe if you stop playing everquest or warcraft or trying to impress the other cranky little boogers in your CS class you'll realize that you don't need a liquid cooled 6core 64bit processor with 16g of RAM and a terabyte of onboard HDD space!